adverb inversion

English translation: See comments below...

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04:38 Apr 25, 2007

English to English translations [PRO]Social Sciences - Linguistics / grammar

English term or phrase:adverb inversion

What is the difference between "For no money would she sky-dive" and "For no money, she would sky-dive"
And can we say "Under no circumstances will I take a day off." and "Under no circumstances, I will take a day off." are there any more examples? how to explain it??

Explanation:To start with, it's not really anything to do with 'adverb inversion', but rather, the inversion of subject / verb word order.

But in fact, what makes the difference in both your examples is the addition of the comma; what you are in fact doing there is inverting the order of the two clauses in the sentence, and the comma is used to make this clear.

So in your first example, the second sentence:

"For no money, she would sky-dive"

could be re-written with the conventional word order:

"she would sky-dive for no money"

at which point, the meaning is unambiguous.

The same is actually true for your second example (sorry, David!), except for the fact that the sentence doesn't really make a lot of sense either way round — unless one assumes that it follows on from something else, to which the 'under no circumstances' is merely the reply.

So a simple test would be to see if you can re-write it without the comma and putting the clauses back into the right order; clearly, this can't be done for the versions with subject/verb inversion (which, incidentally, it seems to me, only work because of the negative, which may be another clue to help you)

Explanation:To start with, it's not really anything to do with 'adverb inversion', but rather, the inversion of subject / verb word order.

But in fact, what makes the difference in both your examples is the addition of the comma; what you are in fact doing there is inverting the order of the two clauses in the sentence, and the comma is used to make this clear.

So in your first example, the second sentence:

"For no money, she would sky-dive"

could be re-written with the conventional word order:

"she would sky-dive for no money"

at which point, the meaning is unambiguous.

The same is actually true for your second example (sorry, David!), except for the fact that the sentence doesn't really make a lot of sense either way round — unless one assumes that it follows on from something else, to which the 'under no circumstances' is merely the reply.

So a simple test would be to see if you can re-write it without the comma and putting the clauses back into the right order; clearly, this can't be done for the versions with subject/verb inversion (which, incidentally, it seems to me, only work because of the negative, which may be another clue to help you)

Robert Fox: Except that I cannot imagine a situation where I would use the second part of the second example, other than by making it two sentences. It would then be a very forceful statement by the speaker.

Craig Meulen: Good explanation as usual, Tony. I consider both of the asker's second examples to be unclear and if they were in my students' work I would question them. Re-ordering them makes it much clearer, as you suggest.